Never Take Leadership Advice From Someone You Wouldn't Let Manage the Dressing Room
I've never understood why people take advice from people whose lives they don't actually want. It seems such an obvious fucking problem.
If I want to get somewhere, the first person I'm interested in is somebody who has already been there. I don't ask the bloke sitting in a ditch for directions up the mountain because he's wearing an expensive jacket and has a certificate explaining geography. Yet people do the equivalent all the time. They take financial advice from people who aren't financially independent, business advice from people who've never owned a business, and leadership advice from people nobody would willingly follow to the pub. That, for me, is the heart of Anton Kreil's tenth and final secret. Choose role models that suit your objective. Find people who have achieved something resembling what you want to achieve, understand how they did it, steal the useful bits and leave the rest on the table.
One of my most important role models in business is Sir Alex Ferguson.
On the surface that might sound strange because I run a technology and scientific organisation rather than a football club. My dressing room contains coders, scientists, engineers, biologists and chemists rather than footballers, and nobody has yet offered me eighty million quid for one of my coders, although if Real Madrid suddenly develops an urgent requirement for geospatial software I'm willing to take the call. But underneath the different industries, the management problem is remarkably similar. A football manager has talented people with different abilities, ambitions, personalities, insecurities, egos and stages of development. So do I. His job was never simply to understand football. It was to take a collection of human beings and create an organisation capable of performing consistently. That's leadership whether the people are wearing football boots or sitting behind three computer monitors arguing about Python.
Ferguson also appealed to me because he's a fellow Glaswegian. There was something familiar about the philosophy. Standards matter. Discipline matters. Loyalty matters. Winning matters. People matter. Excuses don't become more impressive because somebody has inserted them into a PowerPoint presentation. When Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse studied Ferguson's management approach, she distilled it into eight leadership principles. Start with the foundation. Dare to rebuild your team. Set high standards and hold everyone to them. Never surrender control. Match the message to the moment. Prepare to win. Rely on observation. Never stop adapting. I bought the materials and studied them with genuine enthusiasm because I could see almost immediately that this wasn't really a course about football. It was a course about building and managing an organisation.
More importantly, Ferguson had actually fucking done it. His laboratory wasn't a seminar room full of management consultants drawing circles on whiteboards. It was Manchester United. Results appeared on a scoreboard every week and millions of people were waiting to tell him he was a useless bastard whenever things went wrong. There was nowhere to hide. He couldn't explain a three nil defeat by announcing an exciting strategic realignment and promising enhanced stakeholder engagement during the next reporting period. The scoreboard said three nil. Everyone went home miserable. Theory is lovely until somebody punches it in the mouth. Ferguson's ideas had been punched in the mouth for decades and were still standing.
When I started my company, I was the entire dressing room. There wasn't anybody to lead because the workforce was sitting in my chair. If something needed doing, I did it. If something went wrong, I knew exactly who was responsible because I could see the prick in the mirror. Then people arrive, and eventually the founder's job changes. Today there are 43 people in the organisation. At that size I cannot run around trying to kick every ball myself. At some point you have to stop being the player and become the manager. That's harder than it sounds because founders become addicted to their own usefulness. We want to solve every problem, approve every decision, answer every question and inspect every fucking paperclip. It feels like leadership because we're busy. Often it's just interference wearing a management badge. Ferguson helped me understand that the manager's job isn't to be the best player in every position. If I'm the best coder, engineer, scientist, chemist and biologist in a company employing people specifically to do those things, I've hired terribly.
His first philosophy, start with the foundation, has become particularly important to me. Ferguson believed in developing young people rather than relying entirely on buying finished talent. We've started doing something similar. Our last four hires in our Seoul office have been eighteen year old school leavers who decided they didn't want to go to university. These aren't kids who failed academically and needed somewhere to land. They left high school with the equivalent of straight A grades across their subjects, including maths, English and the sciences, the areas that matter enormously to us. They could have stepped onto the conventional university conveyor belt and appeared in the employment market several years later with a degree attached to them like a luggage label. Instead, we've effectively started building our own little youth academy.
I love the philosophy behind that. Find intelligence, character, curiosity and potential early, put young people around experienced people, give them real responsibility and see what happens. Ferguson understood that developing youth wasn't charity. It was long term infrastructure. The important question for me isn't simply what an eighteen year old knows today. It's what that person could become at twenty three, twenty eight or thirty three after years surrounded by coders, scientists and engineers operating at a high standard. If we do our job properly, we're not merely filling vacancies. We're developing people who may eventually become part of the spine of the organisation. Ferguson had the Class of 92. I'm not suggesting our four eighteen year olds are about to become Beckham, Scholes, Giggs and the Nevilles because that would be a fairly unreasonable amount of pressure to put on the poor bastards before they've finished their first coffee. But the principle is the same. Don't just shop for talent. Learn how to fucking grow it.
His second philosophy, dare to rebuild your team, matters for exactly the same reason. Ferguson rebuilt successful teams before they completely declined. That's much harder than rebuilding a losing team because success is incredibly persuasive. When something works, every instinct tells you not to touch the fucking thing. Companies fall into exactly the same trap. The structure that works with five people becomes awkward at twenty. What works at twenty can become useless at forty. Technology changes, clients change, markets change and the people required for one stage of an organisation aren't necessarily the people required for another. Most organisations rebuild when smoke is already coming through the floorboards. Ferguson was prepared to start moving the furniture before the fucking fire arrived.
Then there are standards, and I mean actual standards rather than the corporate bollocks version where somebody hangs a poster in the kitchen saying Excellence Is Our Passion underneath a photograph of a mountain. Standards are what you tolerate. If mediocre work is accepted, mediocre becomes the standard. If lateness is constantly tolerated, lateness becomes the standard. If one talented arsehole is allowed to behave however he likes because everyone is frightened he might leave, being an arsehole has effectively become part of the compensation package. Ferguson understood that culture isn't what an organisation writes on the wall. Culture is what happens after somebody crosses the line and everybody turns around to see whether the manager does anything about it.
That connects directly to his insistence that the manager never surrender control. This is where football and business practically shake hands. Talented people are enormously valuable. Talented people who decide the organisation cannot survive without them can become enormously dangerous. At some point an indispensable employee can turn into a hostage taker with a company email address. Ferguson understood that no individual player could become bigger than Manchester United. I apply the same philosophy to business, and that includes me. Especially me. If the company cannot operate because one person goes on holiday, gets sick, resigns or wakes up convinced he's Napoleon, that's not an indispensable employee. That's a structural weakness wearing shoes. Build the organisation so that people matter enormously without allowing any single person to become the fucking organisation.
Ferguson's philosophy about matching the message to the moment is another one I've found increasingly important as the dressing room has grown. Forty three people means forty three different human beings. Some respond to pressure. Some need confidence. Some need space. Some need bluntness. Some need responsibility dropped into their hands before they realise they're capable of carrying it. Treating everyone identically isn't necessarily fairness. Sometimes it's just lazy management. A football manager wouldn't coach every player in exactly the same way because every player isn't the same. Yet companies constantly design management systems that treat employees like identical tins of beans travelling along a conveyor belt. Human beings are inconveniently human. That's the fucking job.
Then there is observation. Ferguson learned the value of stepping back from training so he could watch what was happening rather than constantly being buried inside it. That lesson becomes more important as a business grows. When you're doing the work yourself, you're watching the ball. When you step back, you can finally see the pitch. Who works well together. Who is improving. Who takes responsibility when nobody is watching. Who makes other people better. Who needs help. Who creates problems. Who somehow leaves a trail of burning furniture behind them every time they enter a room. A founder who insists on touching everything eventually becomes like a football manager who runs onto the pitch and starts tackling his own players. Enthusiastic perhaps, but not particularly fucking helpful.
Preparing to win is another philosophy I like because so many organisations appear to spend their lives preparing not to lose. Meetings about risks. Meetings about meetings. Documents explaining why another document is required. Committees designed to ensure nobody can ever be identified as the person who actually made a decision. Eventually the company becomes a tortoise wearing a crash helmet. Extremely safe, beautifully documented and going absolutely fucking nowhere. Preparing to win means working backwards from the objective. What people do we need. What capability is missing. Where are we weak. What could go wrong. What can we fix before it does. Then somebody makes a decision and everybody gets on with it.
Finally there's adaptation, which might be the reason Ferguson remained successful for so long. Football changed enormously during his career. Players changed, money changed, training changed, sports science changed, media changed, ownership changed and competitors changed. Ferguson changed with it. That's surprisingly rare because people adore being proved correct once and then spending the next thirty years defending the evidence. Businesses do exactly the same thing. We succeeded because of X, therefore X must remain sacred until the sun explodes. Bollocks. The world doesn't owe your successful formula another season. Yesterday's advantage can become tomorrow's museum exhibit while everybody inside the company is still standing around admiring the fucking thing.
And that's why Ferguson is such a perfect example of Anton's tenth secret for me. I didn't choose him as a role model because I wanted to become a football manager. I chose him because he'd solved a problem I needed to solve. How do you take talented people, develop them, establish standards, deal with different personalities, maintain authority, rebuild before decline, step back enough to observe the organisation and keep the whole machine adapting over time. The football was different. The human problem was almost identical. My dressing room happens to contain coders, scientists, engineers, biologists and chemists. His contained footballers. Strip away the shirts, stadiums and transfer fees and you're left with the same difficult raw material. People.
That's how I think role models should work. I don't need Sir Alex Ferguson's life. I need some of his leadership philosophy. I don't need Anton Kreil's life. I need some of his thinking. I've learned about markets from people who work in markets, money from people who manage money, and business from people who have actually built things. I take the useful parts. I'm basically building my own machine from stolen spare parts. Ferguson gives me part of the gearbox. Anton supplies something else. A friend provides another component. Experience explains why the fucking brakes caught fire last time. Eventually the machine becomes mine.
Perhaps that's also the right place to finish all ten of Anton's secrets. Blindly agreeing with him would completely miss the point. Sometimes I agree with him completely. Sometimes, as with ditching the smartphone, I tell him to fuck off and keep my Samsung. A role model isn't a prophet. The moment somebody requires obedience, we've stopped discussing role models and started pricing robes for a fucking cult. The objective isn't to become Anton Kreil or Alex Ferguson. It's to become better equipped to run my own life and my own organisation.
So choose role models that suit the objective. Find people who have already solved the problem sitting in front of you. Study what worked, understand why it worked, test it against your circumstances and throw away whatever doesn't fit. Most importantly, look at where somebody ended up before accepting their directions. If they've spent thirty years building precisely the life you're trying to escape, perhaps don't hand them the map. Never ask a prisoner for directions out of the prison, and never take leadership advice from somebody you wouldn't let manage the dressing room.